Trying to make sense of a world gone mad.... blogging on Climate Change, War, Terror - plus local stuff about Bristol and music and more...

Friday, May 30, 2008

A Bolton Primer

Recently arch-Neocon John Bolton cancelled a speech in Bristol as protesters planned to picket the talk - an act of cowardice from a man who advocates dead and destruction on a mass scale. But beyond what we know of him, critic of the UN and busy flogging his new book, what do we know of him... There is this for starters;

"Beyond his UN-bashing, Bolton has not just been extreme in his foreign policy views, he has been wrong and reckless: accusing Cuba of developing biological weapons and Syria of posing a serious WMD threat without proof. (The CIA felt obliged to block him from testifying before Congress on Syria and WMDs.) He also has had his brushes with scandal, receiving money from a political slush fund in Taiwan and advocating for Taiwan in congressional testimony (when he was not in government) without revealing he was paid by a Taiwanese entity to write policy papers for it. (He might have even broken the law by failing to register as a foreign agent.)"

So we have a man for whom the law is just somthing in the way of his idological aims. Who seems happy to take cash to push politics, who thows accusations around like confetti and who is often wrong. However he was also a key part of the Iran-Contra scandal in the 80s when right-wing elements of the US funded a terrorist group to wage a dirty war. Here is an example of what they go up to;

"Washington spent more than $4 billion on El Salvador in the ’80s, backing wildly brutal regimes and their death squads against a leftist insurgency. The 12-year civil war left 75,000 Salvadorans dead--overwhelmingly civilians killed by U.S.-supported forces [including one of] the worst atrocities of the war: a Salvadoran army massacre in El Mozote that left 800 to 1000 civilians dead."

"At the 2001 UN Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons, announced that Washington would oppose any effort to regulate the trade in firearms, non-military rifles, or any effort that would "abrogat[e] the constitutional right to bear arms." According to Tamar Gabelnick, Director of the Arms Sales Monitoring Project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), this destroyed any possibility of consensus at the meeting."

"Making and selling small arms is a worldwide business. Nearly 7 million commercial handguns and long guns are produced annually. About 75% of these are made in the USA or the European Union. Other important producers include Brazil, China, Canada, Japan and the Russian Federation...Small arms kill an additional 200,000 people in ‘peaceful’ nations each year in homicides, suicides, unintentional shootings and shootings by police. In countries like Brazil, USA and South Africa, guns are a leading cause of death among young men....An estimated 2 million children have been killed with small arms since 1990."

He has also opposed treaties and has actively sabotaged agreements on nuclear weapons, testing nukes and biological and chemical weapons. Oh and he helped to stop the US joining the International Criminal Court. This is a man for whom ten of thousands of human lives is but the grist to his ideological machine - Pax Americana. I will leave the last word to former right-wing Senator Jesse Helms;

"John Bolton is the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon, if it should be my lot to be on hand for what is forecast to be the final battle between good and evil in this world."

"If you want to know about governments, all you have to know is two words: governments lie."I.F. Stone

"The State is an abstraction devouring the life of the people." Michael Bakunin

"...ironically, perhaps, the best organised dissenters in the world today are anarchists, who are busily undermining capitalism while the rest of the left is still trying to form committees."Jeremy Hardy